August 5, 2009

Tamarind does not see the point of needles cougars

Meet Pointlesswing and Needlesstail, two loaned wind riders from the dodgy second hand mount dealer in K3.

Pointlesswing goes very well uphill if you get out and push.

The problem is … the problem is … they have names now.

And I’m totally convinced that the dodgy goblin mount dealer is going to take Pointlesswing to the knackers as soon as I hand him back.

Needlesstail is from The Thousand Needles. We know this because there are Needless Cougars all over that place.

(Yes, yes, I know, they’re Needles Cougars, not Needless Cougars, but I’ve been mis-reading their name since I was a small cow and it’s an in-joke that’s stuck).

M’Pocket Tank wants her very own, non totally generic flyer so she’s going to take Needlesstail to The Thousand Needles and destroy the harness, which we think will symbolically represent releasing him, in his dotage, into the wild.

But, well, I can’t bear to part company with Pointlesswing. He may have a list to the right, gout, a dickey heart and only one tooth but, dammit, he has spirit, he has zest, he has verve. We’ve been fighting the Scourge in Icecrown together. He has as much right to take the fight to Arthas (slowly, very very slowly) than any young wippersnapper of a proto-drake.

Ways I have died in the vicinity of Pointlesswing:

1) Forgetting I was on foot
2) Summoning my chicken by accident and then leaping off cliffs
3) Dismounting in mid-air
4) Being shot off his back by a variety of allies, vrykul and scourge siege weaponry
5) Soaring blithely out of his licensed zones
6) Attempting to do funky things with levitate – now it has no reagent cost – and failing. Badly.

My biggest complaint with slowfall is when I take a leap, hit the button, and realize I had forgotten to detarget the last person I spoke to, so it doesn’t self-cast. This is usually followed by a splat.

On the other hand, I was kind of impressed (despite myself) by a shadow priest who took me out as I flew at top speed away from a PvP encounter (I had been camped, so I rezzed, hopped on my epic flyer, and was hauling ass back to safety). Said priest flew above me, dismounted, dotted me up, and levitated to the ground, while I (not at full health, and too far off the ground to land in time) died. I’ve never been a PvPer, so I gather that’s a more common tactic than I’d realized, but I had never seen it before at that point, so I was duly impressed.

Some very unkind terms spring to mind for such behavior. I hate “world PvP” AKA “griefing” with an undying passion, it brings out the worst in so many people. And I’ll never understand why people feel so “k3wl” for ganking undergeared lowbies or NPCs 60 levels below them or tricking people into getting flagged by sitting flagged in a questgiver and then having their friends gun the victims down from a nearby platform (hello, Quel’danas release, what an ugly chaos that was).

Oh yeah, my mage has had at least two “death by mistargetted Slowfall” incidents since the patch that made it castable on others, too. :p It’s especially easy to do when you’ve been talking to a vendor or questgiver in an elevated place like Wyrmrest. “Slowfall. SLOWFALL! Why is this not — oh crap!” *dead*

I might actually have to mouse-click set levitate because it’s causing me such an insane amount of splatty death.

I know nothing about pvp either but that does sound like a pretty impressive way to kill someone. On the other hand, pvp, gah! Also why on earth do people corpse camp? Seriously? Isn’t that just boring for everybody?

I feel kind of validated by all the people who aren’t interested in PvP – occasionally rampant PvPers make me feel like my masculinity has, in someway, been found wanting in that I don’t see the appeal of killing other players. It’s probably, to be fair, that I’m rubbish at it but also I find it totally immersion breaking. It reminds me that I’m not at adventurer in Azeroth, I’m just a person playing a game.

Oh, to be sure, I was annoyed (I was doing the Hellfire Peninsula PvP quests for some reason that now eludes me, so I was kind of asking for it, and I wasn’t “camped” by higher level toons, just a couple of them.) And I was even annoyed to die when I was fleeing. I just had this one part of my brain that basically said “holy crap, that was kind of impressive”

Of course, that’s the best way to do Levitate (or Slowfall, or bubble-jump for pallies, or flightform for druids). You jump first, then cast! Good for a silly little rush, or occasionally, the entertainment value of a messy death.

I’ve never encountered these rental mounts of which you speak. Are they Horde-only? Or some neutral NPC? I must say, I’m hopelessly spoiled, the limitation of getting my characters their epic flying mounts is most often going to be level, rather than gold. I didn’t even know there WAS a flying trainer in K3 until you mentioned it (though one time, I did try to learn flying training in Dalaran, and was highly disappointed that the only NPC who would sell me an actual mount was only selling the overpriced colorswapped version and I had to run to SMV anyway.)

I say again, windriders should not have standing or ground-running animations. They’re not meant to be running about on foot any more than bats are. It just looks wrong, and their wings shrink down so horribly when they land. There’s a reason all of the grounded windriders in old Azeroth have their own specialized perches to drape their glorious wings on.

I just wish you could get a bat. That would be totally awesome, especially if you were undead.

You can grab the rental mounts from just outside K3 in Storm Peaks – which is a goblin city, and thus neutral. The goblin is somebody “the second hand mount dealer” or something like it which is really cute :)

I’ve spent very little time in Dalaran, it looks great, but my computer hates and judders itself to death. M’Pocket Tank has a blue wind rider, which just looks totally *wrong* to me. I am all about Pointlesswing The Bog Standard.

I suppose it would just be impractical to keep swapping from air to ground mounts, but I miss my chicken :(

Tamarind is a holy priest (in World of Warcraft; in real life he is something different) which means - according to some of the folks he has PUGed with - he stands at the back in a sissy robe and does nothing.